I actually have the Garrus one. :) The Shepard's pretty cool, and the BioWare store has a black haired version, but I want the Play Arts Kai one myself. Guess I better grab it before EVERY store sells out...

Why am I a teetotaler? Why can't I just drink my memories away like everybody else?

That doesn't always work. I, for one, have perfect memory of everything I've ever done while drunk. Whether I want to remember it or not...

Then you've either never been blackout drunk or love telling fabulous and unprovable tales to saps on the internet.

Well that's true by definition. A blackout means alcohol-induced memory loss, so if I've never had alcohol-induced memory loss then I can't have been "blackout drunk".

However your statement carries the implication that this is an issue of the quantity of drinking, and I can only assure you that it is not. I have been as drunk as a human being can get while remaining conscious and still remembered every detail. I've been drunk enough to lose consciousness...I'll confess that I do not have memories of events that occurred while unconscious, however I still remember the events leading up to that point.

Blackouts do not occur uniformly in all people. This has actually been scientifically researched. There is something called "predisposition to blackouts"...which I don't seem to have any of.

When I unplugged my phone from the charger this morning I found that the micro-USB port on the phone came out with the plug.

Whoops.

Guess it's time for a new phone. Actually it's been time for a new phone for a while, this thing was already pretty beat up. I've been looking at all the latest Android gadgets but I just can't seem to find anything I like. The things I want out of a phone don't really seem to be what's trendy...

I guess I could just get an S4 or something, but man I hate Samsung's shitty software. Why can't they just leave Android alone? I think Sony's Xperia Z looks pretty sweet (and I've never been a fan of Sony's phones before), but for some inane reason they don't seem to have any plans to release it in the US, despite the fact that it's already out everywhere else in the world. I could import it, but it won't have the right frequencies for the faster data options. Then there is the HTC One which looks OK but it has the shittiest battery life of the bunch (and all of them are pretty shitty in that respect...nobody makes phones with decent battery life anymore).

And of course none of these phones have keyboards. Nobody makes phones with keyboards anymore! But I like keyboards!

Guess it's time for a new phone. Actually it's been time for a new phone for a while, this thing was already pretty beat up. I've been looking at all the latest Android gadgets but I just can't seem to find anything I like. The things I want out of a phone don't really seem to be what's trendy...

I guess I could just get an S4 or something, but man I hate Samsung's shitty software. Why can't they just leave Android alone? I think Sony's Xperia Z looks pretty sweet (and I've never been a fan of Sony's phones before), but for some inane reason they don't seem to have any plans to release it in the US, despite the fact that it's already out everywhere else in the world. I could import it, but it won't have the right frequencies for the faster data options. Then there is the HTC One which looks OK but it has the shittiest battery life of the bunch (and all of them are pretty shitty in that respect...nobody makes phones with decent battery life anymore).

And of course none of these phones have keyboards. Nobody makes phones with keyboards anymore! But I like keyboards!

Try a Nexus 4. Yeah, keyboards are dying, but try the trial of swiftkey and i doubt you'll want a physical keyboard after trying it out.

Try a Nexus 4. Yeah, keyboards are dying, but try the trial of swiftkey and i doubt you'll want a physical keyboard after trying it out.

My big beef with the Nexus 4 is that it's limited to 16 gigs of non-expandable storage, which frankly I find completely unacceptable. Heck, my current phone is almost 4 years old and it came with 32 gigs on-board and a micro-SD slot. How can anyone sell a supposedly high-end phone with only 16 gigs today? What was Google thinking...OK, I know what they were thinking. They want to push their cloud services so they don't want people to have a lot of local storage. But I don't want to play that game.

I haven't had much time to post lately. Spring will do that to a mad gardener and landscaper. My pathetic body is still totally sore from walking all over the University of Illinois campus on Saturday. My wife was in the Illinois Marathon, and I dragged the kid around to their gardens and arboretum. Too bad it was miles from the hotel. Oops. The place was impressive, and so damn sprawling. Really made me happy I never went there like a lot of my colleagues. I just can't stomach large colleges/universities with thousands and thousands of students. Just feels like an ant colony. Plus, the whole obsession with their sports teams would drive me crazy. On the upside, there sure were plenty of attractive young ladies about. Causes the eyes to wander a bit too much. Good thing Nan was off running. I wonder what my 12-year old was thinking. He hasn't shown much interest in the opposite sex yet, but I recall being 12, and I KNOW that I already had crushes by then. He's just such a quiet kid. We'll see.